John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy was trained for the bar, came into money, and spent his career writing about the class that had produced him. The Forsyte Saga follows an upper-middle-class family across decades and treats property as the family religion, including, unforgivably, the treatment of a wife as property. He began the first novel while in love with his cousin's wife, who was trapped in exactly the kind of marriage he would spend his life describing; they married when the divorce was finally possible, ten years later. He was also a working dramatist whose plays argued directly for prison reform, women's suffrage and the rights of workers, and he gave the money from his Nobel Prize to the PEN club's international writers' fund.